CRA glitch forces five extra days for income tax filing

Procrastinators who haven’t yet filed their tax returns have an extra five days to do so thanks to an error by the Canada Revenue Agency.

The CRA mistakenly issued a statement last Friday listing May 5 as the deadline for 2014 tax returns instead of the correct deadline of April 30.

But with too many people presumed to be taking advantage of the extended deadline, the government opted to honour it.

“2014 tax returns filed by midnight on May 5, 2015, will not incur interest or penalties,” a statement on the CRA website now says. “The CRA sincerely regrets and apologizes for any confusion this may have caused.”

The deadline has been extended in unusual circumstances before – last year extra time was granted when a security breach from the Heartbleed web software bug prompted Ottawa to temporarily suspend online filing through the CRA website.